As I said in the addendum to my last post, maybe I’m not so ready to abandon the technical definition of grammar. In a recent post on Copyediting, Andrea Altenburg criticized the word funner in an ad for Chuck E. Cheese as “improper grammar”, and my first reaction was “That’s not grammar!”

That’s not entirely accurate, of course, as Matt Gordon pointed out to me on Twitter. The objection to funner was originally grammatical, and the Copyediting post does make an appeal to grammar. The argument goes like this: fun is properly a noun, not an adjective, and as a noun, it can’t take comparative or superlative degrees—no funner or funnest.

This seems like a fairly reasonable argument—if a word isn’t an adjective, it can’t inflect like one—but it isn’t the real argument. First of all, it’s not really true that fun was originally a noun. As Ben Zimmer explains in “Dear Apple: Stop the Funnification”, the noun fun arose in the late seventeenth century and was labeled by Samuel Johnson in the mid-1800s “as ‘a low cant word’ of the criminal underworld.” But the earliest citation for fun is as a verb, fourteen years earlier.

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage
notes, “A couple [of usage commentators] who dislike it themselves still note how nouns have a way of turning into adjectives in English.” Indeed, this sort of functional shift—also called zero derivation or conversion by linguists because they change the part of speech without the means of prefixation or suffixation—is quite common in English. English lacks case endings and has little in the way of verbal endings, so it’s quite easy to change a word from one part of speech to another. The transformation of fun from a verb to a noun to an inflected adjective came slowly but surely.

As this great article explains, shifts in function or meaning usually happen in small steps. Once fun was established as a noun, you could say things like We had fun. This is unambiguously a noun—fun is the object of the verb have. But then you get constructions like The party was fun. This is structurally ambiguous—both nouns and adjectives can go in the slot after was.

This paves the way to analyze fun as an adjective. It then moved into attributive use, directly modifying a following noun, as in fun fair. Nouns can do this too, so once again the structure was ambiguous, but it was evidence that fun was moving further in the direction of becoming an adjective. In the twentieth century it started to be used in more unambiguously adjectival roles. MWDEU says that this accelerated after World War II, and Mark Davies COHA shows that it especially picked up in the last twenty years.

Once fun was firmly established as an adjective, the inflected forms funner and funnest followed naturally. There are only a handful of hits for either in COCA, which attests to the fact that they’re still fairly new and relatively colloquial. But let’s get back to Altenburg’s post.

She says that fun is defined as a noun and thus can’t be inflected for comparative or superlative forms, but then she admits that dictionaries also define fun as an adjective with the forms funner and funnest. But she waves away these definitions by saying, “However, dictionaries are starting to include more definitions for slang that are still not words to the true copyeditor.”

What this means is that she really isn’t objecting to funner on grammatical grounds (at least not in the technical sense); her argument simply reduces to an assertion that funner isn’t a word. But as Stan Carey so excellently argued, “‘Not a word’ is not an argument”. And even the grammatical objections are eroding; many people now simply assert that funner is wrong, even if they accept fun as an adjective, as Grammar Girl says here:

Yet, even people who accept that “fun” is an adjective are unlikely to embrace “funner” and “funnest.” It seems as if language mavens haven’t truly gotten over their irritation that “fun” has become an adjective, and they’ve decided to dig in their heels against “funner” and “funnest.”

It brings to mind the objection against sentential hopefully. Even though there’s nothing wrong with sentence adverbs or with hopefully per se, it was a new usage that drew the ire of the mavens. The grammatical argument against it was essentially a post hoc justification for a ban on a word they didn’t like.

The same thing has happened with funner. It’s perfectly grammatical in the sense that it’s a well-formed, meaningful word, but it’s fairly new and still highly informal and colloquial. (For the record, it’s not slang, either, but that’s a post for another day.) If you don’t want to use it, that’s your right, but stop saying that it’s not a word.

“This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.” —not Churchill, but maybe some anonymous government official, or maybe no one at all